1 Financialization in Mexico - Centro de Estudio Sobre Desarrollo

FinancializationinMexico: Trajectory and Limits Eugenia Correa 1 Gregorio Vidal 2 Wesley Marshall 3 Introduction In March of 2009, The Financial Times ran a special series on the future of capitalism, in which many “free market” advocates expressed great consternation that the current crisis would lead to the abandonment of the free market, bringing about protectionism and a renewed inflationary statism that would only exacerbate economic problems. At the same time, voices coming from different perspectives have attributed the crisis to financial institutions and to failings of regulation or lack thereof. While the advocates of free markets are duly concerned over how much force these opposing viewpoints will gainin the near future, the ongoing financial and economic crisis has indeed weakened their principal arguments and opened space for the questioning of the finance led accumulation regime that has come to define the global economy. Many have questioned the free market model and the viability of the finance-led regime of accumulation, the globalization consensus and the neoliberal model (Wade, 2008). In our view, the current crisis reflects the internal limits of the financialized accumulation regime and underlines the contradictions at its heart, including the polarization of wealth and its corresponding unemployment, the hollowing out of productive sectors and public institutions in return for the short term profitability of a handful of financial firms, and increasingly frequent and severe financial crises. 1 Faculty of Economics - Graduate Division, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. 2 Economics Department – Universidad Metropolitana Autónoma – Iztapalapa. 3 Economics Department – Universidad Metropolitana Autónoma – Iztapalapa. 1